Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.

The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologize, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

What we perceive as the present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.

Education which is not modern share the fate of all organic things which are kept too long.

I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.

The point of mathematics is that in it we have always got rid of the particular instance, and even of any particular sorts of entities. So that for example, no mathematical truths apply merely to fish, or merely to stones, or merely to colours. So long as you are dealing with pure mathematics, you are in the realm of complete and absolute abstraction. . . . Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.

A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

The progress of Science consists in observing interconnections and in showing with a patient ingenuity that the events of this ever-shifting world are but examples of a few general relations, called laws. To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

Art heightens the sense of humanity. It gives an elation to feeling which is supernatural...A million sunsets will not spur us on towards civilization. It requires Art to evoke into consciousness the finite perfections which lie ready for human achievement.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Knowledge keeps no better than fish.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.

The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame.

In all education the main cause of failure is staleness.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

A clash of doctrine is not a disaster, it is an opportunity.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

The learned tradition is not concerned with truth, but with the learned adjustment of learned statements of antecedent learned people.

Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.

Dogmatism is the anti-Christ of learning.

The worship of God is not a rule of safety - it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

No Roman ever died in contemplation over a geometrical diagram.

There is a technique, a knack, for thinking, just as there is for doing other things. You are not wholly at the mercy of your thoughts, any more than they are you. They are a machine you can learn to operate.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.